Search Engine Optimization News Blog

What was Microsoft’s biggest mistake? During an address at the Executives Club Chicago, the question was popped to Steve Ballmer during an open question and answer session, in the form of the question,  “If you could have one do-over, what would it be?”

Not many expected the answer ballmer gave – a very honest one! He first touched on the fact that there is never “just one do-over”, and moved on to say ““I would probably say I would start sooner on search.”

Ballmer reiterated that the company was fully capable and had been for years – the application for their findings just hadn’t been visible.  Microsoft was competitive in search – the research and effort had been put in, they weren’t sure of the market and that they had had no business model -it just wasn’t there. CEO Steve Ballmer was appearing at The Executive’s Club of Chicago to discuss “the role of innovation in changing economic times.”  During his speech he addressed many economic issues, and touched on the importance of innovation. He referred to the new Bing as a ‘decison engine, and said it was ‘the little engine that could’.

The Xbox announcement, however, seemed to be the highlight of the presentation.  According to Ballmer, the  new Xbox 360 will hit the store shelves in 2010. The new device will feature futuristic technology that Ballmer claims is “really, really, close” to an actuality. The console, which was described as having a “natural interface,” is planned to have a built in camera with the ability to recognize movement and voice.

“We’ve got our mojo back’ said Ballmer.

“The first thing we’re trying to do with this campaign is to capitalize with the latent dissatisfaction that’s going on with the market,” said Danielle Tiedt, general manager, Online Audience Business Group Marketing at Microsoft, commenting that people suffer from “search overload syndrome” when a search returns too many results.

Banner Web ads will likely run on sites such as the New York Times, Huffington Post, and “any place where the audience is really engaged… We’re [using] real world examples about the questions people would ask,” said Tiedt. “The other marketing challenge we have is being part of the conversation around search.” Tiedt continued, saying that Microsoft is trying to get people out of the habit of just going to Google. “The way we’re trying to do that is to integrate beyond just traditional ads. We made a big bet in social media… We’re trying to go beyond just serving ads, and get the voice working for Bing. We’re trying a lot of in-show integration”

The very first broadcast of the new Microsoft television advertising campaign promoting Bing can be viewed on their YouTube channel – it shows a couple discussing future vacation plans. When the wife asks if her husband found tickets to Hawaii, he starts rattling off multiple results he found when searching online – which doesn’t help them at all with their vacation plans. The ad calls this “Search Overload Syndrome”, or SOS, and says that Bing is the cure.

Microsoft, Telligent and speakTECH are working in cooperation to form the three legs of a triangle known as the Social Enterprise Alliance. The Alliance is designed to offer an enterprise social networking solution for companies both in manufacturing and consumer goods sectors.

Rather than co-branding sites Google’s Friend Connect or Facebook Connect, the Alliance is supposed to be a stand alone, one of a kind solution, defining and developing communities based around a company. According to general manager Greg Urquhart of U.S. ISV and National System Integrators, U.S. Partners Group at Microsoft,

“The Social Enterprise Alliance with Telligent and speakTECH demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to recognizing partners that collaborate to offer a higher level of solutions and services offerings that are more relevant to customer needs. By integrating Telligent’s Community Server platform with speakTECH’s integration and services expertise — all of which leverage the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server platform — companies have a better solution to connect with their customers, partners, suppliers and investors.”

Telligent, a leader in enterprise software for online communities and collaboration, has two main offerings – Community Server and Community Server Evolution. Their platform empowers collaboration brands such as Dell, Electronic Arts, Intel, Microsoft, and Reader’s Digest. Their staff is impressive, including Chief Social Scientist Marc Smith, formerly Senior Sociologist Researcher on Microsoft’s R&D team, who now leads Telligent’s R&D analytics and business intelligence efforts – more specifically, Telligent Harvest. Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent, said:

“Manufacturing and consumer goods companies have a unique opportunity to put the power of social computing to work across all aspects of their business, improving engagement and collaboration of employees, partners, distributors and customers. Holistic social computing solutions enable the agile and innovative enterprise.”

Interactive design and technology firm speakTECH brings consultancy, design and development services to the table, building on technology such as Microsoft Office and components of the Windows Platform. Their goal is to improve customer experiences and empower client personnel, improving operational efficiency and uniting technology. Aaron Sloman, CEO of speakTECH commented:

“Companies are finding the return on investment for social media campaigns to be aggressively outpacing traditional marketing strategies. It’s driving a transformation where traditional marketing departments need to re-tool as interactive marketing agencies.”

 Microsoft announced that the company would cut as many as 5,000 jobs over an 18-month period, and started the process in January, letting go about 1,400 people. Now a second wave of layoffs is scheduled which will kick the total closer to the higher of the two numbers.

Microsoft said, “As part of the plan we announced in January to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, today we are eliminating additional positions across several areas of the company. While job eliminations are always difficult, we are taking these necessary actions in response to the global economic downturn.”

Steve Ballmer spoke directly to employees in an email. Amidst the obligatory commiseration over how difficult letting people go is, combined thanks for their contributions, Ballmer said:

Today’s action includes positions in the United States and in a number of countries around the world. In the U.S., affected employees will be notified directly by their managers today. In other countries, local leadership teams will provide more specific information about the impact to their organizations.

With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010. We are moving quickly to reach this target in response to consistent feedback from our people and business groups that it’s important to make decisions and reduce uncertainty for employees as quickly as possible, and so that organizations can concentrate their efforts and resources on strategic objectives.

Microsoft is still reportedly actively hiring between 2,000 and 3,000 workers this year, despite continuing the cuts already planned. No clue where the shuffle is taking place branch-wise, though rumor has it that it is international and domestic in scope.

A Tweet popped up yesterday that was a bit of a shocker. Live Search cashback hasn’t been publicly sharing that many numbers lately, so the report was pretty visible.

A Microsoft Careers post, advertising for an SDET in “Subscription and Commerce” spilled the beans about the rapidly increasing numbers:

Cashback is changing the way online shopping works – it is the future of online shopping: users search for a product, buy it, receive CashBack from Microsoft subsidized by the merchants, creating a win-win cycle where merchants are encouraged to increase the CashBack to attract more users, benefiting both parties. We have launched version 1.0 of CashBack and we get more than 5,000,000 views a day and 10,000 purchases every day – and we’re exponentially growing!
We’re part of the CSAT (Commerce Search Advertising Transactions) which in addition to the Product Search owns the transactions platform for several online services across the company (such as Xbox Live, Zune, AdCenter, Office Live, MSN, OneCare, CRM Live and Windows Live), providing the payments infrastructure used by all these services.

It’s surprising that we haven’t heard more about this program – there was a smattering of information about it right before the holidays, but snce then it seems to have faded off the radar. Good to know it’s still alove and kicking, but one wonders wehy MSN isn’t promoting it more – with Google, Amazon, eBay and youTube firing up consumers about online shopping, you’d think the chance to save would be a big plus.